Court Experience Essay

Court Experience On Friday, I started off my morning by initially meeting Mary at the Arbitration office, which mostly deals with contract, tort, credit collection, and car accident cases. Mostly any civil cases under $50,000 comes to this office, so no criminal cases, and there is no bailiff or court recorders in this office, just Agnes. We then moved to the court house, which is the 22nd judicial circuit, where we went to the third floor and observed mostly criminal cases. Most judges were at educational training, so Judge Seal dealt with the cases that were supposed to be done throughout three or four other court rooms. We got to see the call sheet for the day which told us all the different types of offenses that people are getting called charged for. A couple charges included attempt of murder, 5 charges of child pornography, domestic violence, burglary, and possession of drugs.

To the left of the room there was the juror seating, which had a total of 14 seats. Since there was no trial happening, there were no jurors, however, the seats were occupied by public prosecutors. In the front of the court room there was almost like a long, wooden desk, in which the defendant, public prosecutor, and private prosecutor, if they had one, would approach when called by the judge. Other than the judge being seated behind the structure, there was two sheriffs and three clerks. Usually there aren’t that many clerks seated there at one time, but since there was so many criminal cases being presented in that one court room, they had extra. Also, all throughout the court houses, there was the Bill of Rights posted on the